Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Artwords bookshopStuff incident experienced at 22:23 on January 3rd. Posted in Igor’s stuff at 22:17.
Tags: art, artwords, artwords bookshop, book, books, bookshop, broadway market, hackney, words
On Saturday I went to have yet another puncture repaired, and hopefully delay the next similar incident, by having some new tyres fitted to my bike at Lock 7 Cycle Café. On wandering along Broadway Market to pass the time while waiting for the work to be done, I chanced on the Artwords bookshop, a sister to the one on Rivington Street. It's a treasure trove. Several times I realised in the course of my visit that I was just gazing, mouth agape, at the shelf- and tablefuls of gorgeous, fascinating, beautiful books. Spent so long browsing that it would have felt really rude not to take anything with me. I love this place. I'd love to find a sort of cultural Shangri-La like this hidden in big city hills, a literary, linguistic and licentiously visual labyrinth, with room after room of tomes and quartos and lavish lithographic layouts, and spend days and weeks and months absorbing and soaking myself in the splendour, luxuriating in its lushness.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Weasel wordsOutrage noticed and scheduled for inclusion in Igor’s rants at 10:17 on August 21st. Posted at 14:45. 2 comments.
Tags: carbon, carbon neutral, change, climate, climate change, clothing, environment, greenwash, landfill, marks, meaningless, neutral, packaging, spencer, weasel, weasel words, words
This, on the wall in Marks & Spencer in Islington, North London, is one of the most meaningless, vague, weaselly, vacuous environmental "statements" I've ever seen. "By 2012 we'll aim to ensure that none of our clothing or packaging needs end up as landfill" - what does that mean? In 2012, you'll finally grace us with a decision that, at some unspecified, subsequent point, you'll somehow engender a situation where all of your clothing and packaging can be disposed of using methods other than burying them in holes in the ground? And what methods might those be? Sure, recycling could be one possible method, but does this "statement" in any way imply that it would be employed, as against, I don't know, setting fire to them, or breaking them down using some bizarre radiation process? And do you think the fact that they won't "need" to end up in the ground absolves you of any and all responsibility for the means and ultimate effects of their disposal?
No doubt there's some website or information leaflet out there somewhere which gives more detail of how M&S really are saving the world, but in terms of the phrasing and the message, this is meaningless, vacuous greenwash of the worst sort, designed to induce a feeling of hazy, warm goodwill towards M&S without any actual justification. I really hope the people who come up with this stuff find it hard to sleep at night.
No doubt there's some website or information leaflet out there somewhere which gives more detail of how M&S really are saving the world, but in terms of the phrasing and the message, this is meaningless, vacuous greenwash of the worst sort, designed to induce a feeling of hazy, warm goodwill towards M&S without any actual justification. I really hope the people who come up with this stuff find it hard to sleep at night.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
SignifiersThought formulated in Igor’s thoughts at 00:13.
Tags: design, ink, intention, interpretation, meanings, paper, print, representation, signifiers, thoughts, words
Once ‘again’, the temporal markers which the flow of possibly random yet seemingly somehow conjoined flickers of »SOMETHING EXISTS« which presents itself to me as ‘I’ has learned to recognise as representing a linear progression of occurrences through the structural map of happenstance this ‘I’ infers from the way things appear to it quite literally flew by (as, I understand, they are wont to do when fun is immanent), and soon, the me-thing (a) did a decision(b) about what it would do with a book(c), and then the decision made it do something right back; it(b) made it(a) do reading(d) on it(c). It also made things change in the world: suddenly, seeming - through moving ‘as if with voluntary power instinct’ - to be ‘like’ huge cliffs (but probably ‘actually’ not doing so, and so being even more like them than it had at first seemed, apart, obviously, from the whole being-really-massive-and-made-of-rock thing), wave upon wave of light bounced jauntily off the contrast of the ink and paper and each one jammed its being into ‘my’ brain, but their beings weren't what they had been any more; they brimmed with someone else's thinking-chunks. They'd got stuck on when the glancing off the meme-transmission device happened, and now they were inside the ‘I’ for sure, deffo, no messing. ‘OUCH’ I said, also ‘GET OFF’ and ‘EWWWW’ because my ‘I’ didn't want someone else's brain squirted all over the inside of its one; but actually it didn't feel like what the ‘I’ thought having someone else's brain smeared on it would do what ‘feeling’ felt like to it at all. It just made more things happen in the ‘I’. Well, let ‘me’ tell ‘you’, that was just fine with ‘me’. No argument ‘here’.
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